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Monthly Archives: November 2002

It turns out that vision had been percolating in Wright’s head for nearly a decade. Back in 1994, Wright told Wired magazine something that sounds downright prophetic in retrospect: “In 15 years…I can design a house that’s so much fun I can charge people to visit it online, and I’ll make a living sitting there and elaborating on it every day,” he said. In many ways, a massively multiplayer Sims Online would fulfill that prediction. Wright further refined his ideas during a 1995 conversation with author Neal Stephenson, who is credited with creating the idea of the metaverse–a virtual community of avatars not unlike today’s massively multiplayer games–in his novel Snowcrash. “In many ways I wanted The Sims Online to be like Snowcrash, where the players would create the world,” Wright explains. “In fact, the original Sims was my attempt at creating a set of tools for players so they could eventually create their own world and avatar to take online.”

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“The situation with wireless broadband in Tanzania is that you can get access as reliable as and as high speed as any connection you could get in Europe,” said John Tumelty, the general manager of Mobitel which provides businesses like Anna Mbattah’s with a wireless service.
“People in Tanzania have excellent access to the internet.”

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These ‘promiscuous’ transposons have found special favour with genetic engineers, whose goal is to create ‘universal’ systems for transferring genes into any and every species on earth. Almost none of the geneticists has considered the hazards involved.

Amazing and hilarious found footage of LSD being tested on British troops (mpg) “The men began to relax and to giggle…One hour and ten minutes after taking the drug, with one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up…He himself then relapsed into laughter. [via the great New World Disorder]